Yes, but does it fit in a children's shoe box, operate near silently, have a nifty remote, HMDI out, wireless internet and bluetooth, and look awesome? Or is it trailer park trash; loud, overweight, ugly and unemployed half the time?
My first mac mini was because I was doing audio recording. Fan noise really ruined recording. Do you really want to hear your whiring fans watching a movie during the quiet bit? Or you could brag about how it's in a room on the other size of wall, which most people don't have the skills to wire up. That was my first Mac, and it's been more mac every purchase since.
Sorry - but my actual real world benchmarks show that's just not true, we had to almost double our projected hardware requisition for HP hardware when our Mac benchmarks turned out so have been so much faster than their PC counterparts with what seemed like almost identical hardware. My calculator can show that the cheaper thing is often wrong as well: add up a high gamut IPS display, all those juicy extras that most forget like Firewire 800, a high quality bluetooth keyboard and mouse, non-budget level hard disks, power management that means your computer doesn't sound like a 747 landing in your office most of the day, a truly compatible CPU, USB sockets that aren't so close to each other that half are useless and you have to buy a hub, which can really suck, built-in webcam and microphone that aren't awful, time saved because deliberating between four models can't take more than about 10 minutes, then you can walk into a store and just pick one up, one year walk-into-the-store warranty, and more often than not, an iMac looks possibly cost-effective. Now pile software on that, compare Numbers, Pages and Keynote to Word, Excel and Powerpoint, Garage Band for free, iMovie for free, iPhoto for free, OS upgrades for $30, not $100 or more and my iMac is positively a budget solution!
Get Joe the Code Monkey to install his IDE with git support, a git client and then he installs cygwin because he likes it. Then watch as he spins his wheels for a week trying to figure out why his SSH key doesn't work, and goes hunting around every directory and every board to figure out why, then gets fired for low productivity. This is not a hypothetical situation, and it was a day I was glad to have a Mac.
Montecarlo is a suboptimal approach to high complexity algorithms of just about any type, not particularly an analysis technique. Because they produce inconsistent results, most folks avoid them preferring to use something else, in fact, pretty much anything else. SVMs have a higher predictability when you use an appropriate kernel function, or do good feature-space mapping, and normally with a reasonable grey area that can be delegated, most of your data can be filtered very quickly. kNN type solutions for certain problems are good, and then there's various gaussian resonance techniques as well. Fourier is good for some kinds of data, particularly those that have elements in the time-domain that are on a cycle, which is often true in time-domain situations. Decision trees can be very effective for probabilistic and deterministic risk systems, and there's always bayesian learning too. Sometimes what looks like Montecarlo can be pseudo-solved using simple ML with gradient descent, and if you use the stochastic gradient descent, it can end up being much much faster than Montecarlo, and produce better results. You still need a kernel function for most of those anyway, and some kind of pre-flight linear regression is often necessary too. ALL those things can be done on any platform as libraries exist, and tools too like Rapid Miner to do all of that.
Actually, I think I've got at least one pretty compelling reason to switch, which has to do with reinstallation. Occasionally Windows needs to be reinstalled due to either infection, registry corruption, or other software/hardware issues. This gets into some really interesting problems, because in order to reinstall Windows, you need:
A) A Windows CD that matches the license key given to the machine. This isn't as simple as it sounds, because license keys are tied to build version, not just the Windows version. So it's not enough to have a copy of "Windows XP Home" if that's what's on the box.:-/ And most people get Windows with their computer, already installed, and are not given reinstall disks to bring the machine back to its original state. So it's common to have to purchase a NEW copy of Windows software in order to "reinstall" it.
Every had a new machine? They all come with recovery partitions these days. Who doesn't buy a new machine every two to three years? If Joe Public's machine becomes unusable, they take it to the shop, or buy a new one. Even OS X comes with a recovery partition now, and theirs doesn't even wipe out user data.
B) Device drivers for Windows for the machine, either via downloads from the manufacturer or from a motherboard CD. End-users typically either forget where this CD is, don't know they ever had it, or were never given it in the first place. "What would I need that for?"
See A, recovery partition
C) Backups? "Oh, yeah, that. No, I don't have a rolling backup of the machine. Can't you just back up the files before reinstalling Windows?" Except on Windows machines, the user's files can be all over the place. If the computer technician is lucky maybe the user only used their home directory, but in practice this is often not the case.
Most half decent backup software deals with this. Also see entry on OS X recovery partition which doesn't destroy user data. Add time machine and you're about home and dry.
D) It's common on Windows machines to have commercial software installed that the end user doesn't have license keys or reinstallation disks for. So the user doesn't want their machine reinstalled unless it's absolutely necessary.
The end result is that it's often a painful, long process to reinstall a Windows box. You need to prepare by downloading the necessary drivers and have them on hand, get a license for the correct version of Windows -- and that's assuming the version of Windows is supported on the hardware -- and then spend hours doing the install and going through multiple reboots to add drivers, and then lots more reboots that come along with doing Windows updates.
Let's contrast this with installing a Linux distribution -- for argument's sake let's say it's Debian Stable, and go down the same list:
Really? Most commercial software these days is activate over the internet style. Most will work fine when you reinstall, some may require you to have released the license before reinstall, and often a 10 minute phone call to the vendor will sort it, which is often less time than searching for the damn CD would take, or searching over endless posts about how Linux rocks to find the right driver module that got lost somehow randomly.
A) Assuming a fast internet connection is available, download and burn the latest netinstall.iso. No license key issue.
B) Generally speaking (although there are exceptions), no special drivers are necessary to do the installation. [Brand new hardware may not be fully supported, so there can occasionally be issues with missing disk drive interface drivers or network drivers. These occasional issues can be tricky to work around.]
See OS X again, no drivers because Apple controls the hardware. It always works, 100%
Erm, have you been paying attention at all? Ars just posted an article showing IE usage dropped below 50%. The other 50% isn't some other Microsoft thing, and a good chunk is OS X increases. I can show you five years of analytics data on a site with over 10mil page views a year showing a steady increase in OS X usage that is exponential, and it's a bigger exponent if you count iOS.
Linux has been the defacto standard in the server market for a decade. Anyone who has a clue installs Linux. I can think of very very few cases where I ran into a tech who had a clue who would choose to install Windows Server. People install it mostly because they have no choice or don't know better or spent too much on a college education in.NET.
Ever tried to get a Rails server running on Windows? Rails is the fastest growing segment in web-facing tech, and it barely works on Windows at all, and nobody cares.
Whilst the Linux Desktop lies in the hands of those who "scratch an itch", those who want to customize everything, those who want yet another MP3 player, it will NEVER become viable, not ever. It is at an all time low in visible internet usage. I wouldn't touch anything else other than Linux with a barge pole on my server, no doubt.
Stop wasting time building worthless desktop widgets, yet another MP3 player, and arguing over pointless crap like whether Microsoft or Google or Apple is the most evil. Wake up, use OS X for awhile, then build some cool shit for Linux.
But you won't. Because being right, being the most l33t, having the coolest MP3 player on the planet with the most bad-ass over-clocked piece of crap that only you and your mates care about is more important than figuring out what Joe Public actually wants or needs, and making Linux on the desktop a reality.
You had your chance a decade ago. OS X was just a glimmer in Steve Jobs' eye, and Microsoft was about to embark on Vista, the most tragic piece of crap, worse even than Windows ME. If you couldn't get it together then, you've really got an uphill battle now.
For me, it didn't used to be "You" it used to be "Us". Then I decided to make cool shit, and suddenly Linux wasn't there for me anymore. Couldn't scan, couldn't print, couldn't read Word files, couldn't import PowerPoint properly, no Photoshop, no Illustrator, worse, no Visio nor anything like it, even AIM was a pain for awhile as Pidgin crashed over and over. I had a life, a job, and Linux wasn't there, and the real world didn't give a crap how "Free" it all was, and I was tired of being up all night trying to recover my X Windows config back to usable, or coax my network share back onto the network.
You want people to use Linux on their desktop, it's easy, build it so normal people like it. Build it so it has the next killer feature, and isn't copying the last one. Build it so you never see or need to see a prompt ever again unless you want to. Build it so that people aren't embarrassed when something doesn't work, because it always works. Beat OS X at it's own game, or better yet, re-invent the game.
I think that many in the Linux world, even those who own a Mac, are missing the point.
Its not just about the OS. Steve Jobs ended that war. Linux is fine, Windows is fine, OS X is fine. They are fine in different ways for sure, but it's irrelevant now.
It's about convenience, which today means integration at all levels. You CAN do it all on Linux or Windows, but it takes twice the effort or more.
You can say quite correctly that this feature or that feature only makes it 5% better, and that is true. Then you get 20 of those features, and it's now twice as good.
iPhone is easier than Android. iPad is the most solid tablet. AppleTV is as good for media streaming, often better (it's not supposed to be an HTPC). iTunes is a solid media player. MacBook Air is very handy, and very quick. iMac is beautiful and effective for most.
Maybe none of them are a ton better than their rivals, and we could argue that all day. But add it all up, sew them together with the app store and iCloud (lame name maybe) and you've suddenly got a whole load of better on your hands. The five devices all work perfectly together. No hassles, no problems, no drivers, no compatibility issues, no weird config problems. Small merits individually, but together, they are shaming others around Mac users to switch. I'm talking on a Skype chat and a Windows user has a sound driver problem, they look foolish. I'm using a website, and Firefox just doesn't quite work, a Linux user feels embarrassed. A document needs printing, and any serious computer user will cringe at the mention of printing, because we've all been there. On your Mac, it prints, or it doesn't. My iPad has peer-to-peer white-boarding, but awww, you have random tablet running obscure rebadged Android, sorry, you're missing that collaboration.
It only takes a small problem that happens often enough before people use whatever makes them feel the least foolish, or the most epic. Today, for most, it's Apple; tomorrow, who knows?
Except for ending slavery (in the US, everywhere else thought is was just the right thing, and both eugenics and segregation continued at least into the 1960s in the US), Communism, except the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and Nepal, wait, who's communism fell by war? American Independence (unlike the other former colonies who largely seceded peacefully, or largely so, almost all of which have lower poverty, higher literacy and better healthcare) The Nazis, well, you have me there.
curiously I looked at the physical specs of the two products. iPad is 9.5" wide, and the Galaxy Tab is 9.69". A difference of 1/5th of an inch. I was skeptical at first, but a fifth of an inch seems a bit weird to make sweeping statements about. As for the aspect ratio, I can definitely see the 16:9 screen being a bit odd looking and I'm wondering if it wasn't that aspect ratio that made the device "feel" too big.
Oh, yeah, that's right cos linux is such a roaring success with consumers and clearly being a fan of the richest and most beloved tech company on the planet is stupid, a company that went from nothing to sacking the crown from Microsoft in ten years, whilst Linux was sitting on the sidelines doing nothing. Last I checked web-stats for my company's products, desktop linux was now lower than 'Other'. You can trash Apple fanboys all you want, but like most of the other mental masturbation in the open source community, it won't get users using Linux. All the resources of the biggest open source community on the planet, dwarfing Apple, and yet most people today don't even know what Linux is. You are either a Linux fanboy or a moron... oh wait.
If you're holding customer credit card info, you'll need to meet PCI compliance regs. If you're not, you should look at PCI compliance regs anyway, because they're a good guideline.
Then, when that has scared you enough, wake up look up prepared statements, and then don't use MySQL, especially if you are using PHP. Views don't work properly, subqueries bite, and you can't have joins in a delete statement that makes doing compound deletes virtually impossible without serious pain and suffering. If you were planning on using Amazon RDS, know that if you're tables are MyISAM based, the backups don't work.
Why exactly are these two things related? Qt is a completely different development line from WP 7, it's a windowing toolkit not a mobile OS. Show me some good news about MeeGo, and I might, just maybe, get a bit excited.
Sure, you could go on about how Qt is at the foundation of MeeGo, but it's at the foundation of lots of other things too, like KDE amongst others. Good news for Qt does not imply good news for MeeGo. In fact, possibly quite the opposite, as I can imagine a scenario where Nokia had left over contracts with outside vendors, and maybe a few Linux oriented staff that didn't get rid off, so they're just redirecting them at Qt and taking them off MeeGo.
It's just a pity that Sony makes such good laptops, not so many other makers that build a product that solid alas, they've all put some amount of crap into it to make it cost less than an Apple.
I've read a number of these tests, and most of them have some pretty serious flaws.
It's pretty pointless to do ABX testing on almost any popular music. The dynamic range is pathetic to start with, and the level of subtlety is pretty low. It's like trying to tell the difference between two LCD monitors showing a Mondrian, which whilst awesome, doesn't have a lot of subtle hues in it (though this is a slightly crap example because if you compare a cheap TN panel with a full gamut display, you probably could spot the difference, but that's sort of like comparing the sound of a $5 transistor radio playing your favourite hit with a dedicated CD player, amp and speakers).
Some of the tests push SACD vs CD through a crappy amp, crappy cables and crappy speakers playing dull music. It's not surprising no-one could tell the difference.
Take a classically trained professional orchestral musician and sit them in front of a good quality set-up (four, not five figures of carefully picked equipment) and play for them something like Scheherazade and you may see them weep when you switch from CD to SACD.
I'm guessing your average audiophile is more about shiny than about actual sound. Your classically trained musician has had to pick out a single instrument from an orchestra and transcribe their part.
I'll tell you this for nothing, I've an SACD player, and I use iTunes in my main area, and I would _greatly_ enjoy 24-bit music. I lament often how little is available on SACD and DVD audio. I can most certainly tell the difference. I've recordings of some music on both SACD and regular CD, and without knowing which was going in, I could tell you which was which. I have a dedicated DAC hooked up to my Mac, and even with current high bit-rate AACs it makes a big difference from just hooking up my amplifier to the audio out port. 24-bit files would be sweeeeet.
Have you seen compilers lately? In most scenarios, the compiler can do better optimization than a human. In most data situations, B-Trees are good, but in certain applications, there are other structures that yield better results, particularly if your data set is smaller than your RAM size. Both DBAs and software engineers know that an inappropriate data structure or join order can produce order of magnitude differences in performance.
Only assuming your hash function returns a perfect distribution and your hash table is the exact size of your data in all cases, which in a database table would be rarely the case. Add to that that most queries aren't single lookups, and require sorting, and your single instance O(1) hash table becomes about as useful as a lead balloon.
Crikey mate, have you actually worked with any real users? Most folks don't even know what a security update is, where to get one, or why they would need it. Once they get hacked, IF they have a backup, they'll restore, and most of them will do nothing about it, some _might_ install security updates if they know that's possible, or if it shows up in a Google search for the problem they describe, if they are capable of using the language to describe it.
90 thousand lines? Wow, what the hell are you writing in? ASM?
I have huge website projects with highly complex business logic and external API calls requiring lots of code that isn't typically in a website, and the biggest system I've worked on comes in at about 50k including the templates.
Most places I've worked at who do a lot of website projects that aren't in a CMS, and even some that are, have a standard base build that has all the foundation functionality in it. Basic login pages, database classes for usual constructs like Users and Roles, a database configuration and a base set of graphics.
Those 90 thousand lines of production tested code? Everybody's use case is different, and everybody pretty much has to write a custom extension at some point. As they say, a chain is only as strong as the weakest link, and anyone writing a module for a CMS is likely to produce a pretty weak link, no matter how well tested the base system is.
Given that simple job site searches yield a whole lot more results for Java positions first, then.NET then anything else relating to website development, which seems to fall mostly into the scripting languages arena, Ruby, Python, Perl etc. I've never seen a posting for a C++ web dev position in over a decade, and I'd be a candidate if there was, I'm pretty handy in C++.
What operating systems are written in C++? Linux sure isn't, I'm pretty sure most of OS X is C, then Objective-C then some C++. Pretty sure BSD isn't, and looking at the Open Solaris site, looks like C, AIX, nope, True64, nope, OS400, nope. Windows, I'm fairly sure they sucked in a good chunk of BSD, which is C, and honestly, who cares about the rest of it, it's a piling of stinking shit, not too many folks who would disagree.
I think the only popular web framework I recall that used C++ to build modules was ColdFusion, and about a year later, they switched to Java.
Re:CMS only half the issue...
on
Foundation Drupal 7
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Have you looked at some of those folk infrastructures and white papers on 'cool' things they've invented to get around the unbelievable limitations of scripting langues and MySQL?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but does it fit in a children's shoe box, operate near silently, have a nifty remote, HMDI out, wireless internet and bluetooth, and look awesome? Or is it trailer park trash; loud, overweight, ugly and unemployed half the time?
My first mac mini was because I was doing audio recording. Fan noise really ruined recording. Do you really want to hear your whiring fans watching a movie during the quiet bit? Or you could brag about how it's in a room on the other size of wall, which most people don't have the skills to wire up. That was my first Mac, and it's been more mac every purchase since.
Sorry - but my actual real world benchmarks show that's just not true, we had to almost double our projected hardware requisition for HP hardware when our Mac benchmarks turned out so have been so much faster than their PC counterparts with what seemed like almost identical hardware. My calculator can show that the cheaper thing is often wrong as well: add up a high gamut IPS display, all those juicy extras that most forget like Firewire 800, a high quality bluetooth keyboard and mouse, non-budget level hard disks, power management that means your computer doesn't sound like a 747 landing in your office most of the day, a truly compatible CPU, USB sockets that aren't so close to each other that half are useless and you have to buy a hub, which can really suck, built-in webcam and microphone that aren't awful, time saved because deliberating between four models can't take more than about 10 minutes, then you can walk into a store and just pick one up, one year walk-into-the-store warranty, and more often than not, an iMac looks possibly cost-effective. Now pile software on that, compare Numbers, Pages and Keynote to Word, Excel and Powerpoint, Garage Band for free, iMovie for free, iPhoto for free, OS upgrades for $30, not $100 or more and my iMac is positively a budget solution!
And we haven't even started on laptops.
Get Joe the Code Monkey to install his IDE with git support, a git client and then he installs cygwin because he likes it. Then watch as he spins his wheels for a week trying to figure out why his SSH key doesn't work, and goes hunting around every directory and every board to figure out why, then gets fired for low productivity. This is not a hypothetical situation, and it was a day I was glad to have a Mac.
Montecarlo is a suboptimal approach to high complexity algorithms of just about any type, not particularly an analysis technique. Because they produce inconsistent results, most folks avoid them preferring to use something else, in fact, pretty much anything else. SVMs have a higher predictability when you use an appropriate kernel function, or do good feature-space mapping, and normally with a reasonable grey area that can be delegated, most of your data can be filtered very quickly. kNN type solutions for certain problems are good, and then there's various gaussian resonance techniques as well. Fourier is good for some kinds of data, particularly those that have elements in the time-domain that are on a cycle, which is often true in time-domain situations. Decision trees can be very effective for probabilistic and deterministic risk systems, and there's always bayesian learning too. Sometimes what looks like Montecarlo can be pseudo-solved using simple ML with gradient descent, and if you use the stochastic gradient descent, it can end up being much much faster than Montecarlo, and produce better results. You still need a kernel function for most of those anyway, and some kind of pre-flight linear regression is often necessary too. ALL those things can be done on any platform as libraries exist, and tools too like Rapid Miner to do all of that.
All that said, Numbers does rock.
Why?
Actually, I think I've got at least one pretty compelling reason to switch, which has to do with reinstallation. Occasionally Windows needs to be reinstalled due to either infection, registry corruption, or other software/hardware issues. This gets into some really interesting problems, because in order to reinstall Windows, you need:
A) A Windows CD that matches the license key given to the machine. This isn't as simple as it sounds, because license keys are tied to build version, not just the Windows version. So it's not enough to have a copy of "Windows XP Home" if that's what's on the box. :-/ And most people get Windows with their computer, already installed, and are not given reinstall disks to bring the machine back to its original state. So it's common to have to purchase a NEW copy of Windows software in order to "reinstall" it.
Every had a new machine? They all come with recovery partitions these days. Who doesn't buy a new machine every two to three years? If Joe Public's machine becomes unusable, they take it to the shop, or buy a new one. Even OS X comes with a recovery partition now, and theirs doesn't even wipe out user data.
B) Device drivers for Windows for the machine, either via downloads from the manufacturer or from a motherboard CD. End-users typically either forget where this CD is, don't know they ever had it, or were never given it in the first place. "What would I need that for?"
See A, recovery partition
C) Backups? "Oh, yeah, that. No, I don't have a rolling backup of the machine. Can't you just back up the files before reinstalling Windows?" Except on Windows machines, the user's files can be all over the place. If the computer technician is lucky maybe the user only used their home directory, but in practice this is often not the case.
Most half decent backup software deals with this. Also see entry on OS X recovery partition which doesn't destroy user data. Add time machine and you're about home and dry.
D) It's common on Windows machines to have commercial software installed that the end user doesn't have license keys or reinstallation disks for. So the user doesn't want their machine reinstalled unless it's absolutely necessary.
The end result is that it's often a painful, long process to reinstall a Windows box. You need to prepare by downloading the necessary drivers and have them on hand, get a license for the correct version of Windows -- and that's assuming the version of Windows is supported on the hardware -- and then spend hours doing the install and going through multiple reboots to add drivers, and then lots more reboots that come along with doing Windows updates.
Let's contrast this with installing a Linux distribution -- for argument's sake let's say it's Debian Stable, and go down the same list:
Really? Most commercial software these days is activate over the internet style. Most will work fine when you reinstall, some may require you to have released the license before reinstall, and often a 10 minute phone call to the vendor will sort it, which is often less time than searching for the damn CD would take, or searching over endless posts about how Linux rocks to find the right driver module that got lost somehow randomly.
A) Assuming a fast internet connection is available, download and burn the latest netinstall.iso. No license key issue.
B) Generally speaking (although there are exceptions), no special drivers are necessary to do the installation. [Brand new hardware may not be fully supported, so there can occasionally be issues with missing disk drive interface drivers or network drivers. These occasional issues can be tricky to work around.]
See OS X again, no drivers because Apple controls the hardware. It always works, 100%
Erm, have you been paying attention at all? Ars just posted an article showing IE usage dropped below 50%. The other 50% isn't some other Microsoft thing, and a good chunk is OS X increases. I can show you five years of analytics data on a site with over 10mil page views a year showing a steady increase in OS X usage that is exponential, and it's a bigger exponent if you count iOS.
Linux has been the defacto standard in the server market for a decade. Anyone who has a clue installs Linux. I can think of very very few cases where I ran into a tech who had a clue who would choose to install Windows Server. People install it mostly because they have no choice or don't know better or spent too much on a college education in .NET.
Ever tried to get a Rails server running on Windows? Rails is the fastest growing segment in web-facing tech, and it barely works on Windows at all, and nobody cares.
Yes, that poster is mad, because 99% don't care what the heck it is, only if it works and works well.
Whilst the Linux Desktop lies in the hands of those who "scratch an itch", those who want to customize everything, those who want yet another MP3 player, it will NEVER become viable, not ever. It is at an all time low in visible internet usage. I wouldn't touch anything else other than Linux with a barge pole on my server, no doubt.
Stop wasting time building worthless desktop widgets, yet another MP3 player, and arguing over pointless crap like whether Microsoft or Google or Apple is the most evil. Wake up, use OS X for awhile, then build some cool shit for Linux.
But you won't. Because being right, being the most l33t, having the coolest MP3 player on the planet with the most bad-ass over-clocked piece of crap that only you and your mates care about is more important than figuring out what Joe Public actually wants or needs, and making Linux on the desktop a reality.
You had your chance a decade ago. OS X was just a glimmer in Steve Jobs' eye, and Microsoft was about to embark on Vista, the most tragic piece of crap, worse even than Windows ME. If you couldn't get it together then, you've really got an uphill battle now.
For me, it didn't used to be "You" it used to be "Us". Then I decided to make cool shit, and suddenly Linux wasn't there for me anymore. Couldn't scan, couldn't print, couldn't read Word files, couldn't import PowerPoint properly, no Photoshop, no Illustrator, worse, no Visio nor anything like it, even AIM was a pain for awhile as Pidgin crashed over and over. I had a life, a job, and Linux wasn't there, and the real world didn't give a crap how "Free" it all was, and I was tired of being up all night trying to recover my X Windows config back to usable, or coax my network share back onto the network.
You want people to use Linux on their desktop, it's easy, build it so normal people like it. Build it so it has the next killer feature, and isn't copying the last one. Build it so you never see or need to see a prompt ever again unless you want to. Build it so that people aren't embarrassed when something doesn't work, because it always works. Beat OS X at it's own game, or better yet, re-invent the game.
And here follows arguments about the EULA, something that 99% of all people will never read, nor care to, as evidenced by Facebook.
You realize that in the computing world, everyone in this thread is the 1%, me included now.
I think that many in the Linux world, even those who own a Mac, are missing the point.
Its not just about the OS. Steve Jobs ended that war. Linux is fine, Windows is fine, OS X is fine. They are fine in different ways for sure, but it's irrelevant now.
It's about convenience, which today means integration at all levels. You CAN do it all on Linux or Windows, but it takes twice the effort or more.
You can say quite correctly that this feature or that feature only makes it 5% better, and that is true. Then you get 20 of those features, and it's now twice as good.
iPhone is easier than Android. iPad is the most solid tablet. AppleTV is as good for media streaming, often better (it's not supposed to be an HTPC). iTunes is a solid media player. MacBook Air is very handy, and very quick. iMac is beautiful and effective for most.
Maybe none of them are a ton better than their rivals, and we could argue that all day. But add it all up, sew them together with the app store and iCloud (lame name maybe) and you've suddenly got a whole load of better on your hands. The five devices all work perfectly together. No hassles, no problems, no drivers, no compatibility issues, no weird config problems. Small merits individually, but together, they are shaming others around Mac users to switch. I'm talking on a Skype chat and a Windows user has a sound driver problem, they look foolish. I'm using a website, and Firefox just doesn't quite work, a Linux user feels embarrassed. A document needs printing, and any serious computer user will cringe at the mention of printing, because we've all been there. On your Mac, it prints, or it doesn't. My iPad has peer-to-peer white-boarding, but awww, you have random tablet running obscure rebadged Android, sorry, you're missing that collaboration.
It only takes a small problem that happens often enough before people use whatever makes them feel the least foolish, or the most epic. Today, for most, it's Apple; tomorrow, who knows?
Except for ending slavery (in the US, everywhere else thought is was just the right thing, and both eugenics and segregation continued at least into the 1960s in the US),
Communism, except the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and Nepal, wait, who's communism fell by war?
American Independence (unlike the other former colonies who largely seceded peacefully, or largely so, almost all of which have lower poverty, higher literacy and better healthcare)
The Nazis, well, you have me there.
curiously I looked at the physical specs of the two products. iPad is 9.5" wide, and the Galaxy Tab is 9.69". A difference of 1/5th of an inch. I was skeptical at first, but a fifth of an inch seems a bit weird to make sweeping statements about. As for the aspect ratio, I can definitely see the 16:9 screen being a bit odd looking and I'm wondering if it wasn't that aspect ratio that made the device "feel" too big.
Oh, yeah, that's right cos linux is such a roaring success with consumers and clearly being a fan of the richest and most beloved tech company on the planet is stupid, a company that went from nothing to sacking the crown from Microsoft in ten years, whilst Linux was sitting on the sidelines doing nothing. Last I checked web-stats for my company's products, desktop linux was now lower than 'Other'. You can trash Apple fanboys all you want, but like most of the other mental masturbation in the open source community, it won't get users using Linux. All the resources of the biggest open source community on the planet, dwarfing Apple, and yet most people today don't even know what Linux is. You are either a Linux fanboy or a moron... oh wait.
If you're holding customer credit card info, you'll need to meet PCI compliance regs. If you're not, you should look at PCI compliance regs anyway, because they're a good guideline.
Then, when that has scared you enough, wake up look up prepared statements, and then don't use MySQL, especially if you are using PHP. Views don't work properly, subqueries bite, and you can't have joins in a delete statement that makes doing compound deletes virtually impossible without serious pain and suffering. If you were planning on using Amazon RDS, know that if you're tables are MyISAM based, the backups don't work.
Have a nice life.
Why exactly are these two things related? Qt is a completely different development line from WP 7, it's a windowing toolkit not a mobile OS. Show me some good news about MeeGo, and I might, just maybe, get a bit excited.
Sure, you could go on about how Qt is at the foundation of MeeGo, but it's at the foundation of lots of other things too, like KDE amongst others. Good news for Qt does not imply good news for MeeGo. In fact, possibly quite the opposite, as I can imagine a scenario where Nokia had left over contracts with outside vendors, and maybe a few Linux oriented staff that didn't get rid off, so they're just redirecting them at Qt and taking them off MeeGo.
It's just a pity that Sony makes such good laptops, not so many other makers that build a product that solid alas, they've all put some amount of crap into it to make it cost less than an Apple.
I've read a number of these tests, and most of them have some pretty serious flaws.
It's pretty pointless to do ABX testing on almost any popular music. The dynamic range is pathetic to start with, and the level of subtlety is pretty low. It's like trying to tell the difference between two LCD monitors showing a Mondrian, which whilst awesome, doesn't have a lot of subtle hues in it (though this is a slightly crap example because if you compare a cheap TN panel with a full gamut display, you probably could spot the difference, but that's sort of like comparing the sound of a $5 transistor radio playing your favourite hit with a dedicated CD player, amp and speakers).
Some of the tests push SACD vs CD through a crappy amp, crappy cables and crappy speakers playing dull music. It's not surprising no-one could tell the difference.
Take a classically trained professional orchestral musician and sit them in front of a good quality set-up (four, not five figures of carefully picked equipment) and play for them something like Scheherazade and you may see them weep when you switch from CD to SACD.
I'm guessing your average audiophile is more about shiny than about actual sound. Your classically trained musician has had to pick out a single instrument from an orchestra and transcribe their part.
I'll tell you this for nothing, I've an SACD player, and I use iTunes in my main area, and I would _greatly_ enjoy 24-bit music. I lament often how little is available on SACD and DVD audio. I can most certainly tell the difference. I've recordings of some music on both SACD and regular CD, and without knowing which was going in, I could tell you which was which. I have a dedicated DAC hooked up to my Mac, and even with current high bit-rate AACs it makes a big difference from just hooking up my amplifier to the audio out port. 24-bit files would be sweeeeet.
Have you seen compilers lately? In most scenarios, the compiler can do better optimization than a human. In most data situations, B-Trees are good, but in certain applications, there are other structures that yield better results, particularly if your data set is smaller than your RAM size. Both DBAs and software engineers know that an inappropriate data structure or join order can produce order of magnitude differences in performance.
Only assuming your hash function returns a perfect distribution and your hash table is the exact size of your data in all cases, which in a database table would be rarely the case. Add to that that most queries aren't single lookups, and require sorting, and your single instance O(1) hash table becomes about as useful as a lead balloon.
Crikey mate, have you actually worked with any real users? Most folks don't even know what a security update is, where to get one, or why they would need it. Once they get hacked, IF they have a backup, they'll restore, and most of them will do nothing about it, some _might_ install security updates if they know that's possible, or if it shows up in a Google search for the problem they describe, if they are capable of using the language to describe it.
90 thousand lines? Wow, what the hell are you writing in? ASM?
I have huge website projects with highly complex business logic and external API calls requiring lots of code that isn't typically in a website, and the biggest system I've worked on comes in at about 50k including the templates.
Most places I've worked at who do a lot of website projects that aren't in a CMS, and even some that are, have a standard base build that has all the foundation functionality in it. Basic login pages, database classes for usual constructs like Users and Roles, a database configuration and a base set of graphics.
Those 90 thousand lines of production tested code? Everybody's use case is different, and everybody pretty much has to write a custom extension at some point. As they say, a chain is only as strong as the weakest link, and anyone writing a module for a CMS is likely to produce a pretty weak link, no matter how well tested the base system is.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not.
Assuming you're not:
Given that simple job site searches yield a whole lot more results for Java positions first, then .NET then anything else relating to website development, which seems to fall mostly into the scripting languages arena, Ruby, Python, Perl etc. I've never seen a posting for a C++ web dev position in over a decade, and I'd be a candidate if there was, I'm pretty handy in C++.
What operating systems are written in C++? Linux sure isn't, I'm pretty sure most of OS X is C, then Objective-C then some C++. Pretty sure BSD isn't, and looking at the Open Solaris site, looks like C, AIX, nope, True64, nope, OS400, nope. Windows, I'm fairly sure they sucked in a good chunk of BSD, which is C, and honestly, who cares about the rest of it, it's a piling of stinking shit, not too many folks who would disagree.
I think the only popular web framework I recall that used C++ to build modules was ColdFusion, and about a year later, they switched to Java.
Have you looked at some of those folk infrastructures and white papers on 'cool' things they've invented to get around the unbelievable limitations of scripting langues and MySQL?